New Book Releases for the Week of August 26
Featuring new releases by Austin Channing Brown; Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini; Alice Lovejoy; and Guryan Tighe.
We believe in books, and we believe that a great book can shape the way we work, think, and live. Take a look at our picks below and see what speaks to you!
The Porchlight staff members choosing books each week include Porchlight's Managing Director, Sally Haldorson, and the marketing team of Gabbi Cisneros, Jasmine Gonzalez, and Dylan Schleicher. As expert booksellers, we browse publisher catalogs and explore new titles from across the book industry to discover what captures our interest, and we're excited to share our findings with readers like you.
Unless otherwise noted, all book descriptions are provided by their respective publishers.
Our Recommended Books This Week
Gabbi's pick: Full of Myself: Black Womanhood and the Journey to Self-Possession by Austin Channing Brown, published by Convergent Books
As an antiracism educator and writer leading through America’s cycles of racial unrest, Austin Channing Brown reached a crossroads. “I love my work,” she writes, “and I am tired. We are tired. Tired of protesting. Tired of ‘saving democracy.' Tired of educating and explaining.” She began to ask, “What do I deserve, not just as a citizen but as a human?”
Full of Myself is her answer to that question. Weaving personal narrative with perceptive social commentary, she offers a look at the mechanisms that limit who Black women are allowed to be—at work, at home, in community—and the defining moments when she decided self-possession is the justice work she had been made to undervalue. From skinny dipping in the ocean to becoming a mom, she delves into the drama of life and invites readers to begin defining themselves not as empty vessels to improve the world, but as a people born free in spirit, in hope, in joy.
For Black women seeking to understand the true roots of their burnout, or anyone wondering what it means to live joyfully in a hostile world, Full of Myself is a breath of fresh air and an invitation to full humanity.
Sally's pick: Humanocracy: Creating Organizations as Amazing as the People Inside Them by Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini, published by Harvard Business Review Press
Now more than ever, we need organizations that are daring, resilient, and creative. Unfortunately, when confronted by unprecedented challenges, most companies and institutions prove to be timid, plodding, and orthodox. The culprit is bureaucracy. With its top-down power structures and rule-choked systems, bureaucracy hobbles ingenuity and innovation. In a time of upheaval, these long-tolerated impediments are fast becoming competitively and economically untenable. Humanity needs and deserves something better.
In Humanocracy, Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini make a passionate, data-driven argument for uninstalling bureaucracy and reinventing management as we know it. In this extensively updated and expanded edition, readers will find new and compelling case studies, the latest research findings, and a wealth of fresh and provocative insights.
Humanocracy is both a manifesto for institutional renewal and a blueprint for building organizations that are as courageous, energetic, and ingenious as the people inside them. Essential building blocks include:
- Motivation: Rallying colleagues to the challenge of reimagining management as usual Models: Leveraging the experience of vanguard organizations that have successfully disrupted the bureaucratic status quo
- Mindsets: Escaping the industrial-age thinking that undermines the quest to build radically more capable organizations
- Mobilization: Activating a pro-change coalition to hack outmoded management systems and processes
- Migration: Embedding the principles of humanocracy—ownership, markets, meritocracy, community, openness, experimentation, and paradox—in your organization's DNA
If you've finally run out of patience with bureaucratic bullshit; if you're eager to build an organization that can outrun change and outperform expectations; if you believe every team member deserves the chance to do something extraordinary, then this book's for you.
Jasmine's pick: Tales of Militant Chemistry: The Film Factory in a Century of War by Alice Lovejoy, published by University of California Press
The history of film calls to mind unforgettable photographs, famous directors, and the glitz and hustle of the media business. But there is another tale to tell that connects film as a material to the twentieth century’s history of war, destruction, and cruelty.
This story comes into focus during World War II at the factories of Tennessee Eastman, where photographic giant Kodak produced the rudiments of movie magic. Not far away, at Oak Ridge, Kodak was also enriching uranium for the Manhattan Project—uranium mined in the Belgian Congo and destined for the bomb that fell on Hiroshima. While the world’s largest film manufacturer transformed into a formidable military contractor, across the ocean its competitor Agfa grew entangled with Nazi Germany’s machinery of war. After 1945, Kodak’s film factories stood at the front lines of a new, colder war, as their photosensitive products became harbingers of the dangers of nuclear fallout.
Following scientists, soldiers, prisoners, and spies through Kodak’s and Agfa’s global empires, Alice Lovejoy links the golden age of cinema and photography to colonialism, the military-industrial complex, radioactive dust, and toxic waste. Revelatory and chilling, Tales of Militant Chemistry shows how film became a weapon whose chemistry irrevocably shaped the world we live in today.
Dylan's pick: Unmasking Fear: How Fears Are Our Gateways to Freedom by Guryan Tighe, published by Health Communications
When we are in the grip of fear, our world can get very small and for many of us, the number of choices shrink to just four basic reactions: fight, flight, freeze, or fawn. That’s not a lot of options. On a collective level, elements of our society like governments, religions, and businesses sometimes instill fear to divide and control—to keep us feeling dependent on them instead of ourselves. On an individual level, fear can be the reason we’re living a life that’s not reflective of our truth or potential. It’s what keeps us feeling stuck and holds us back. What most of us don’t realize is that fear has much to teach us.
“Fear Technician” Guryan Tighe reframes the way we approach fear from the goal of conquering it to a goal of learning from it by providing readers three gateways to look at fear in a way that frees us: curiosity, gratitude, and purpose. She shows us how to interrupt our initial reaction, pause, check in with ourselves, and rewrite the patterns we use to respond to that which we fear. With this shift in thinking and how to engage it, readers will find new pathways forward as they shift from unintentional reactions to intentional responses.
When we change our relationship to fear, we gain valuable insights that inform our growth and development, connecting us more deeply to our truth. This different approach to fear doesn’t just transform our relationship with ourselves but can also unite us with others through empathy and shared purpose. What has the power to separate us from ourselves and each other—fear—also has the power to unite us. Unmasking Fear shows us that fear is courage unrealized and understanding our fears frees us to pursue the life we want.
